Sunday, September 11, 2016

A Third And Final Grump For Today

[U.S. Commission on Civil Rights] Chairman Martin Castro's remarks were included in a report released Thursday titled: "Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties." A link to the actual report on the USCCR's website is currently broken....

"The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance," Castro, a Democrat appointed by President Obama, said.

He added: "Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others."

Really? So the Founding Fathers intended that there should be laws that privilege the demands of some over the religious convictions of others? How...interesting.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Constitution and the thinking of those who designed it will be aware that the Founding Fathers intended that there should be very little law indeed: the bare minimum required to protect individuals’ rights to their lives, liberty, and property. The Bill of Rights, particularly the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, should make that clear, the contrary representations of the Left notwithstanding. Never in a million years would they have agreed to laws against “discrimination,” one of the Left’s all-time great shibboleths. They would see immediately that such a law tramples on freedom of every sort, especially freedom of religion and freedom of association. They would have sternly catechized whoever might dare to suggest it.

I’ve written on this subject in the past. I’m sure I’ll need to address it in the future. But that a federal bureaucrat – a man not even elected to his position! – should baldly claim that the very first of the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights is nullified by his notions about “discrimination” requires the most severe imaginable response. Perhaps we can send out a blast email accusing him of having blasphemed against the Prophet Muhammad. That would certainly interest the three million or so Muslims in America, don’t you think?

Barack Hussein Obama appointed this...person. Perhaps that’s just one more entry on Obama’s long list of offenses against the American people, but to me it’s a particularly heinous one, especially in light of the demands that Catholic parishes perform same-sex weddings and Catholic doctors perform abortions.

Yet people plaintively ask what could account for the reasons for the rise of the Alt-Right. For my part, I want to know where Americans’ spine has gone. Even a hundred years ago, this sort of obscenity would have us massing around both the White House and Capitol Hill with torches and pitchforks. But back then, we had a grasp of freedom as encompassing more than just “voting for a change of masters.” That appears to be missing from our time.